Canada now has a Liberal/Tory grand coalition gov't

Well said! 

What a gutless wonder. Iggy had this huge threat to hold over Harper, and the only concession he managed to get out of him is a couple of "checkup" votes? At the very least, he aught to have been able to amend the budget to fix EI, and take direct credit for that. 

Peace and order perhaps, but good government? Forget that for the forseeable future.

Coalition is not a dumb idea. Most of the successfull economys and the countrys with the best workers rights are run by coalitions.  Unfortunately iggie is a lieing bastard.

We should now ask who really controls the federal liberals.  

Is it free masons or some other similar organisation?

Because really it is totally fucking stupid for a leader to pass up the chance to be prime minister of Canada. 

I think E.I. will wind up being the Liberals' Achilles heel in all this ... especially down east and in the parts of Ontario that are hurting.  This was obviously not lost on Yvon Godin, who got elected the first time in 1997 during the last EI uprising, when he got up in the House today.

I meant this coalition was stupid. This was a deal brokered by a Liberal leader (Dion) who didn't have the support of his party and the coalition was presented to the public in the most condescending and sophomoric way. 

In the last election there was no discussion of any Liberal/NDP coalition. In fact the NDP's campaign was explicit in trying to portray the party as an alternative to the Liberals.

It is disingenuous to point to other coalition governments. When people vote in Germany or Israel there is an expectation of a coalition government. There was no expectation in this case.

Jack has done himself, the idea of coalition governments and the NDP a great disservice with his recent comments and behaviour on the issue. By throwing a temper tantrum and trashing the Liberals makes Jack look petty and that he was only in it for the honorific "The Honourable" Jack Layton. More importantly where the hell can the NDP go if the Liberals win a minority government in 6 months? Coalition 2.0??? Not likely.

Let's face it the Liberals made a decision that they could live with a budget that got billions of dollars of spending on public housing and infrastructure. They were the senior partner in the agreement and they made a political decision that the budget was "good enough" Iggy went out of his way to say that it was all because of the coalition. He also went on to say that the idea of coalition governments have positively changed Canadian politics forever. A marked contrast to quotes coming out of the NDP and Bloc.

As for passing up the opportunity to be PM. Who the hell wants to be PM during a recession with thousands of people loosing their jobs? Has everybody forgotten to what happened to the ONDP???? Steven Harper is holding a live grenade that is going to go off at any moment, why the hell would you want to jump on it and save him??????

In 6 months the Liberals are going to pull the plug because the Conservatives are "not delivering on the budget". The Liberals have a good case to believe this because Harper has gone out of his way to alienate the civil service and the civil service can kill anything. Threatening to remove the right to strike ring any bells?????

The smart political move for Jack would have been to stand side by side with Iggy and declare this a victory for the coalition. Steal the credit and then raise a crap load of money for an NDP campaign that promoted itself as a coalition partner. But no, Jack's ego couldn't handle it and he couldn't wait 6 months. A little political acumen and the NDP would have had its first federal cabinet position in a stable and long term government.

Oh and Free Masons... really???

leftyboy, we get the point that this whole decision *cough*blunder*wheeze* of Michael Ignatieff has everything to do with the fact that the Liberals want to win a majority, but you are a clown if you really believe that the NDP supporters would applaud Jack Layton for propping up Stephen Harper

Sadly for the dreamers, the Liberals are in no position to win a majority now or any time in the forseeable future.  They got beat by 9% of the vote last election! They are lead by a smug snob who just got off a 30-year hiatus of pretending to be a Brit and then an American. They are in debt. What more do I need to add? Do I really need to mention that last election they enjoyed their lowest support since the party was first founded?

This will be good for the NDP base in that the NDP leadership now has zero excuses for not going whole-hog on their opposition to the war in Afghanistan and the injustice of $60 billion in corporate tax cuts for the Canadian banks that helped get us into this economic crisis. The ratio corporate tax cut:personal tax incentives or cuts:new EI benefits ~ 60:6:1 What a sell-out! Answer me this, is this the kind of new debt Liberal voters want to be paying down at an annual (low-balled) cost of $5 billion, six years from now? If we end up in structural deficit, and if the IMF projections are correct we certainly will, what should get cut first? certainly not health care? post-secondary education? the military?

alea iacta est

At least Jack was able to squeeze a few billion from Martin's budget for social causes. Ignatieff got nothing from Harper. Nothing.

I think the NDP should have walked earlier when it was patently obvious the coalition was dead but I do not agree that there should be any association of victory for this budget.

The budget does not meet any of the testsof what was required-- it has the tax cuts which will undermine governmentfinances that need to be used to support the system not be bled off for people who do not need it; the so-caled stimulus is a sham that for the most part will not happen and where it does represents massive subsidies of private access to public sector activity through P3s and privatization along with asset sales; the people without employment have next to nothing offered them.

How on earth could anyone suggest either the Liberals or NDP should claim credit for this?

I think the Liberals have given the Cons a few inches of rope- question is will they have the guts to snap it tight when there is no more debate that the Con budget will do anything, somethign that will be obvious in weeks or at most 6 months. If this is a strategy to smash the Cons in the next election, I am okay with it but if not then the Liberal opposition is a sham- in any case we will not have to wait long to find out.

The NDP approach should be: the government should have fallen but here is our approach and the benchmarks we will be looking forward over the next six months and be specific.

"Who the hell wants to be PM during a recession with thousands of people loosing their jobs?"

Nobody ever said that being in power would ever be easy. But if you believe that you have something to offer as a leader and as a party then you have to be,lieve that you can provide remedies to the recession and that you can HELP all those people losing their jobs.

If Obama took the attitude you suggest above, he would have lost the US presidential election on purpose on the grounds that it wasn't "convenient" to govern during a recession and let John McCain make all the tough decisions and take all the blame. Thank God he didn't do that. 

So you're saying Iggy and his Liberals are unprincipled jerks? I could have told you that much.

Lefty Boy, I agree with your analysis.

 V Jara, you might be right about Iggy not getting to be PM.  But Layton will sure as hell end in third place (maybe fourth behind the Bloc).  The Libs will do better in the next election than this last one guaranteed.  (not to say they'll win necessarily, but they will do better)

Why:

1.  Dion is gone.  Regardless of how he is, he was perceived to be a lame duck, a nerdy academic, a poor communicator, a poor motivator, a poor unifier.  While people don't know much about Iggy, they know that he has a backbone.

2.  Our voter turnout was the lowest ever I think.  I attribute that, in part, to typical liberal voters staying home b/c they were so digusted with their options.   Those typical liberals probably won't sit out a second election. 

3.  People will be sick of Harper and his dictator like ways.  Red tories might vote with the liberals.  The liberal voters who voted NDP or Green out of disgust might come back.  Harper showed his true, very ugly, stripes in November.  Hopefully the Liberals will remind Canadians of this fact.

My crystal ball:

   Watch for Harper to pull the plug on public subsidies again...after the proper time has passed. It will be a politically popular move -Most people don't understand it's good for democracy. Watch the Liberals go bankrupt (and greens and block) or fight an election on a politically popular move...Which they will not be able to afford. The NDP would get a serious headache from this, but right now they're the only opposition party that wouldn't be outright killed by it.

According to THomas Walkom in today's Toronto Star - http://www.thestar.com/Canada/Columnist/article/578890 - Harper is still removing the right to strike from federal publiic servants. Has anyone else heard this? 

"Or the Liberals could have focused on the budget's less expensive but more ideological elements. These include temporary suspension of union rights in the public service and a frontal attack on the principle of pay equity, under which men and women are paid equally for work of equal value." 

In general, I'm not that shy about making predictions. But at this point I'd feel better off tossing a coin for my bet what the Libs will do in 6 months.

Your optimism about the Liberals is touching. And "Iggy has a backbone" must be the view from within the bubble. Since when does being able to dish out tough sounding rhetoric when nothing is at stake qualify as 'having a backbone'?

There is no evidence that "typical elections" sat out the election more than anyone else. And your point 3 is the reprise of the constant Liberal refrain that people will come back to 'where they belong'... in the Liberal fold, which will allow Canada to be saved. Too bad we only got a few months break from the refrain. My own optimism is that we haven't yet seen the end of Liberals being sufficiently humiliated to hear less from them.

The Bloc probably also has the infrastructure to withstand that move as well, because presently they allocate all donations and membership out to the constituencies and live off the subsidy centrally.  Central fundraising room is then left for the PQ.  But they are a well-enough organized mass-based party that they could reorganize to adjust.  The Greens would be decimated, though.

As for the Liberals, I'm not sure.  They will try to raise the kind of money you get from appearing to be a government in waiting ($500 cocktail parties), and they at least have some room now because the leadership campaigns have wound down (although Bob Rae still has to raise the funds to cover his entry fee).  However, they will be competing against the cost of attending their party convention which also falls under the individual contribution limit for the year.

So, unless they can substantially increase their numbers of small individual donors, they won't be rebuilding as quickly as they hoped to.  And, remember, this will be harder for them to do when the Libs are supporting the Conservatives, and harder still in a recession when they need to find new contributors.

From everything I've read (and read between the lines) by Liberal commentators, Ignatieff's decision seems to have been driven by two main considerations: (i) they could not tolerate any risk of an election at all, and they didn't believe it was as unlikely an outcome as we did, and (ii) they could not tolerate any risk of the NDP becoming legitimized or losing its (undeserved) reputation as "fiscally irresponsible" by cooperating in a coalition with us (notwithstanding the risks to us of cooperating with the Liberals).

This implies to me that they are broker than their spin-doctors are currently letting on, and/or have been told that their debt-to-equity and/or debt-to-income ratios are too high for bankers' comforts in this economy.  And it also implies that the Liberals want to guard fiscal responsibility as a wedge issue, to use both against the Conservatives and the NDP.

I think they could have raised more money in government, but what do I know.